


Selected Joys

by what_alchemy



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Academia, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Discussion of HIV, M/M, Writers & Artists
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-15 09:35:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28936362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_alchemy/pseuds/what_alchemy
Summary: There is the art, and there is the artist.Henry Peglar is just the audience, and that's fine.
Relationships: John Bridgens/Henry "Harry" Peglar
Comments: 30
Kudos: 50
Collections: Bridglar Week 2021, The Terror Bingo





	Selected Joys

**Author's Note:**

> This is my humble contribution to Bridglar Week; I translated the boys to a made-up US University for maximum self-indulgence. I also made Henry come from the north because why not?
> 
> This also fulfills my "painting" square for Terror Bingo.

Another day, another freshman standing Henry up for office hours. Henry sighed and checked his phone for the time. Technically, said office hours were to extend one more hour. In his experience, most students never showed up unannounced, thus without guilt he could gather his things and vacate his table at the art gallery cafe, give himself an extra hour to unwind before having to crack open the grading or the latest chapter of his dissertation or that book on the evolution of the kirk in medieval Scotland he hadn’t even taken out of its packaging yet.

Of course, if he packed up his things and went home, he might miss a sighting of the older man who had lately taken to sitting in the foyer of the art gallery, elbow resting on a stack of books as he stared at the sprawling modern art sculpture that Henry privately thought looked like a particularly warty autumn gourd. Henry held office hours on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and the man—surely, a professor?—had been there gazing through the gourd with a brow knitted by worry every Tuesday and Thursday for the last three weeks.

He was, to Henry’s eye, utterly bewitching.

His hair was salt and pepper—emphasis on the salt—and rather overgrown, but artful with it and always clean, without the redolence of grease Henry had become accustomed to seeing in other men with hair that long. He kept a neat beard and had a strong Roman nose Henry admired. He had warm brown eyes under thick, pensive eyebrows, and they gave him an air of being lonely somehow. Lonely and ready to listen.

Henry shook himself. He was a fanciful fool, dreaming up and ascribing emotions to a man he’d never met. Imagining a kindred spirit in some professor from another discipline, imagining he felt the same kind of emptiness as Henry. Christ. Soon, his fool brain would have them married with two dogs in the hills of the Berkshires—wherever those were in this fuck-off monster of a country.

In the Berkshires, of course, were Peter and Ramón, carving out some semblance of a happy ending in the age of AIDS. Henry rummaged in his messenger bag and pulled out the novel— _Selected Melancholies_ , by John Bridgens. He’d found it in an Oxfam when he was fifteen and just getting the inkling that if he ever told the truth about himself, he would not be welcome in his father’s home. He had stashed it under a loose floorboard at the foot of his bed and read it only when his father was working second shift. _Selected Melancholies_ had shown a sad northern boy that love was possible—that he had more to look forward to than plague and death and loveless collisions of body and soul. Even if that life could not be in England. Even if Ramón died at the end.

The author’s bio on the back cover of _Selected Melancholies_ left much to be desired. _Originally from Woolwich, Kent, John Bridgens now lives in New York._ There wasn’t even a picture. There was a nearly naked Wikipedia entry with no further information but for a short list of publications. While there was no second book for John Bridgens, there were a handful of short stories in literary journals Henry had never heard of, and he had, apparently, edited an anthology of gay and lesbian British literature in 1998. Henry had found it once on eBay but was unwilling to part with $75 for it. So it was to be this: Henry with an ancient copy of _Selected Melancholies_ , and nothing else to know John Bridgens by.

These days his copy was battered, the pages yellowed and held together more by countless applications of shipping tape than its own brittle binding, but it had survived not only Henry’s move to London, but the tumult of his first years in New York and then the precarious U-Haul trip to the heart of the country where he had received full funding for a PhD in British History from University of Illinois at Barrinford. Said U-Haul trip had taken several years off Henry’s life and nearly made him turn to a god he had abandoned long ago, but he had made it, atheism intact.

Every time he thought of it, Henry looked up the Berkshires; they were in Massachusetts, but not, apparently, the part of Massachusetts anyone knew anything about. And, like water from a sieve, the information would leave his brain immediately, until he once again thought something preposterous like _oh, to be married to a tragic and sexy comparative literature/film studies/sociology professor in the Berkshires_ , and google the damn things again. And then Henry would remember about the U-Haul, and comfort himself that he had to remain in Barrinford for a little longer before the academic job market flung him someplace he’d never heard of to toil for beans without tenure.

Henry found he turned to _Selected Melancholies_ when he was feeling particularly sorry for himself. He had dug it up last week—the fourth anniversary of the last time he’d been touched with honest desire—and he read each dog eared page, each nearly-memorized passage. He read them over and over and wondered when he would find his own Ramón.

On the sixth Thursday of covert sexy professor observations, said professor gave Henry seventeen heart attacks when he rose from his bench before the gourd, slung his stack of books under his arm, and headed into the art gallery cafe. He stood at the register gazing up at the menu and giving Henry an unfettered view of impossibly broad shoulders and the strong, obvious muscles of his arms to match. _Jesus fuck_ , Henry thought, and slouched in his seat so as to hide his godawful blushing behind the massive hardback book on, whatever, merchant ship routes from medieval Britain.

Henry squinted over the edge of his book’s cover to see if he recognized any of the books the professor had—to see if he could pinpoint a discipline for the man, and then stalk him via the departmental websites. It was then that he saw something that gave him seventeen more heart attacks— _Selected Melancholies_ , the late-90s American edition if Henry had the right of it. His stomach flipped over and the back of his neck heated; butterflies took up residence in his arms.

 _Go fucking talk to the man, you numpty_ , he thought. But then _no, you’ll make a fucking idiot of yourself, and then he’ll know,_ came right on its heels. With a racing heart he warred silently with himself, and when he finally peeped up, the professor had left the register and was settling in at the table beside Henry’s.

Henry suppressed a moan and bonked himself in the forehead with his book.

“Are you all right?” came a low, lilting voice from his right. Henry startled and faced the professor while blood rollicked violently into his cheeks. Henry could feel his ears flaming. Those brown eyes were filled with concern, and that voice—

“I’m sorry, are you English?” Henry said, and wanted to swat himself most thoroughly with his book. It was heavy enough to crush a cockroach, as he’d learned just yesterday—how much harder could one utter knob from Seaton Sluice be to kill?

A smile emerged from the beard. The eyes were as warm as Henry had imagined. He wanted to slap himself.

“You know, usually that question irritates me, but not when I meet a fellow Brit out here in the great American midwest. What’s that, Sunderland?”

Henry laughed.

“Good ear!” he said. “Not quite, but close. Tiny coastal village, no one’s ever heard of it. But I’ve been here in the US for—christ, ten years now? Eleven.” He gathered his courage like reins and stuck his hand out. “Henry,” he said. A broad hand, its grip gentle but firm, slid into his own. A thrill sparked up Henry’s spine before he pulled away.

“John,” the professor said. “I’ve been here almost as long as you’ve been alive, I imagine.”

Henry smiled and shook his head.

“I’m told I look younger than I am,” he said. He pointed at John’s stack of books. “You’ve got my favorite book there, you know.”

“Oh?” John dragged them to the edge of the table, as if to show Henry each title. “Which one?”

“ _Selected Melancholies_ ,” he said, and John made a strange sound, as if something were caught in his throat. Henry offered to get him a water, but he waved Henry away.

“Ah, no thank you,” he said. “You like _Selected Melancholies_? Really?”

Henry felt himself go hot again, this time with a gathering mixture of excitement and indignance. Perhaps he could _argue_ with the man—with John. Perhaps they could argue over shawarma at the Lebanese place, and then over drinks at John’s, and then—

“You don’t?” Harry said before his fantasies could run away with him again. “I daresay I can change your mind.”

John laughed as if he was surprised he still could. John shifted his chair so he faced Henry fully. Having the whole of his attention on him made Henry’s heart ache.

“I didn’t say I didn’t like it,” John said. “It’s been a long time, is all.”

“Oh, you really must revisit it,” Henry said. “May I?”

John passed the book into Henry’s hands. Their fingers brushed. Henry cleared his throat and dropped his gaze down to where he was searching for the right passage. Page 217.

“Here,” he said, carefully ignoring the way he could feel John looking at him. “Ramón has just tested positive, and Peter knows he has to get tested as well but is too afraid.” Henry swallowed, licked his lips, and began to read. “‘All bodies are blue in the dark. Ramón, slick purple-chrome by moonlight, by streetlight, by lovelight, held Peter’s periwinkle hands to his face as though he could block the tearfall, press each drop back into his eyes, step backwards in time to unravel the threads of all the parties and poppers and pricks that had got them here: holding each other alone at the gates of hell. There is a knot of fungus creeping into bloom at the corner of Ramón’s mouth, almost beautiful the way that ivy crushing a castle in its roots is beautiful, the way fresh blood from an unstoppered wound is beautiful. Tenderness bears Peter downward until he presses dry lips to these blossoms of disease. You’ve killed me, Peter thinks. You’ve killed me and I love you anyway.’”

 _Stupid passage to pick,_ Henry thought as the lump in his throat thickened. _It gets you every time._

There was a resounding silence, and when he looked up, John was staring at him with that concerned tilt to his brows, but Henry could read nothing of it. His imagination left him and filled in no blanks where John’s gaze pinned him.

The urge to apologize rose in Henry’s gullet, but could not get past the emotion that sealed his mouth shut. He wanted to sink into his own book, his own messenger bag, and disappear forever. Hastily he passed _Selected Melancholies_ back to John’s table.

“I’m not in the English department,” Henry said, clearing his throat when his voice came out in a croak. “I’m not, you know, a literature guy. I know there’s all this talk now about gay lit moving beyond AIDS, beyond, I don’t know, anti-romantic tragedy and the impossibility of queer joy. Beyond those subjects that so occupied gay life in the ’80s and ’90s. And that’s—I mean, that’s important, right? Of course it is. But this was important, too. This is, this is our history. I understand wanting to move forward, but that doesn’t mean forgetting. Not all books from that era hold up because—it doesn’t matter. This one does. It _does_. You should reread it. You won’t be sorry.”

The words rushed out of him in a flood of awkward jabber, and Henry could see as if from a distance how painfully embarrassing he was being, could feel John’s eyes on him, thinking him insane no doubt. He dragged breath into his lungs and stood abruptly, dumping all his things into his bag. He hoped he’d had the wherewithal to muster a proper goodbye before he stumbled out of the art gallery cafe like a newborn faun, or the world’s most dramatic gay.

Henry considered changing the site of his office hours to avoid his ongoing humiliation and maybe get that fantasy life of his under control, but the other options were utter shit: the incredibly loud Starbucks in the student union where some of his friends held office hours, or his actual “office,” which was a cubby from the ’60s in a row of cubbies from the ’60s designated for grad students with associate instructorships, and which was tucked away on the opposite side of campus, so far from the actual history department that he had only ever been there once.

Finding out he could host office hours wherever had been quite the coup. Discovering the relative quiet and aesthetic inspiration of the art gallery cafe had been a stroke of genius, and Henry decided he could not give it up. If John didn’t want to see him, then he could simply avoid the art gallery cafe, which should be simple enough being as he’d apparently done so all his life until last Thursday. Henry was a grown up, by God. He would not be run out of his art gallery cafe by his own social awkwardness.

He arrived on Tuesday, quite without student appointments, and pulled out a book. Not _Selected Melancholies_ , which he now had to bury for at least a year before he could look at again. _At Swim, Two Boys_ was a bit more contemporary—emphasis on the _bit_ —but was also set against a historic backdrop, so Henry didn’t know how many contemporary queer lit points he would get for this.

He was staring through the first page for a full five minutes before a figure approached his table and cast a shadow over his “reading.” Henry’s heart clattered into the bowl of his belly when he looked up to see John, brow troubled and back half-hunched as if apologetic for how much space he took up in the world, in the art gallery cafe, in Henry’s psyche.

“Erm,” Henry burbled.

“Hi,” John said, and winced. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to loom over you like this. I just wondered if you’d talk to me a bit more. About _Selected Melancholies_.”

Henry became aware that he was gaping, and he snapped his mouth shut. He could castigate himself for it, and a thousand other faux pas, later.

“Er…what do you want to know?” he asked.

John took the seat opposite him and planted his elbows on the table to rest his chin on his clasped hands. Being the object of his attention was all-encompassing and not a little dizzying.

“You know the book very well,” John said. Henry couldn’t tell if it was a question or not.

“Yes?” he said. “It’s my favorite book. I’m sorry, what do you teach?”

“Creative writing,” John said. “Both to the MFA students and the undergrads.”

“Oh. And you’ve assigned _Selected Melancholies_. So you want to…hear what about it works for me?”

“No, I…sorry, I’m not being very clear.” Here, John reached into a pocket and produced his wallet. He flipped it open to reveal a driver’s license and a selection of cards: credit, business, and loyalty. Henry frowned before taking a look.

John Bridgens.

Henry sat back and looked at him. John—Bridgens!—winced, but nodded, and gave him an anemic little smile. Henry looked at the ID again. John Bridgens, born 9 September, 1965. He would have been only twenty-six when _Selected Melancholies_ was published.

He was eighteen years older than Henry.

“Oh, fuck,” Henry said, and then froze, stricken. John chuckled and shook his head as he put his wallet away.

“I don’t mean to make this strange,” he said, hands raised as if in surrender. “It’s just—I rarely get to pick the brain of a regular reader.” That wince again. “God, I sound like a prick. I mean someone who reads for the pleasure of it, to feel something, or to meet a like mind where one wasn’t expected. Someone who isn’t reading just to root out flaws or dismantle it like an engine to see how it works. There’s something I—” He dragged a hand through that mane of his and shook his head, looking about as nervous and shell-shocked as Henry felt. “I must be interrupting your work,” he said. “I’ll leave you to it.”

“Wait!” Henry said as John stood. John paused, and Henry’d be damned if those eyes didn’t _sear_ with tenderness. He might die. He scribbled his number on a bit of napkin and handed it to John (Bridgens!). “Text me,” he said. “Or, you know, call, if texting’s not your thing. But of course I’d be happy to talk to you about my favorite book of all time, which you wrote.”

Bridgens ducked and shrugged one shoulder, looking terribly enticing under the pained flush.

“That’s very generous of you,” he said.

“I’m not a lit guy, mind,” Henry said. “I’m not going to have long, articulate prepared speeches about allegories and symbolism and what all.”

“All the better, Henry,” John said. “Exactly what I’m looking for.”

Later that night, after Henry had screamed into his pillow and texted his friend Arjun about the entire thing and received, for his pains, a phone call consisting of nothing but an extended shriek into his ear, Henry received another text, painstakingly formal in its punctuation.

**Hello, Henry, this is John. Would you be available to discuss the book over dinner this weekend? My treat.**

Henry screamed into his pillow again. He sent a text back: **Free as a bird**

_It’s just dinner, arse_ , Henry told himself as he discarded another outfit. Why did everything he own make him look like an Irish grandpa about to subject his mainland grandkids to that selkie story for the hundredth time? _God, no wonder no one will fuck you, Peglar_. He threw the latest cable knit jumper on his bed and fished out…another cable knit jumper.

He groaned. It probably wasn’t even a date. John (Bridgens!) just needed to talk about his book with someone who knew it well. He’d acted like it was valuable, Henry not being in the English department. Like Henry could offer something his esteemed colleagues couldn’t. Like Henry knew something. Like they could take a little holiday, maybe to Western Massachusetts.

Henry slapped himself lightly. _Not a date!_ he hissed at himself. _Fuck it_. He grabbed blindly at his drawers. He would wear whatever the universe put in his hands.

It was a faded Arcade Fire shirt. He would look fine. Cool. Casual. Not dreaming up anything stupid and insane.

He slung on one of the cable knit jumpers on his way out the door.

Henry met John at Cornucopia, a farm to table restaurant tucked into a quiet side street off the main drag of what passed for downtown Barrinford.

John looked perfectly edible in a crisp blue button down. He smiled when he saw Henry, and reached his hand out to shake. Henry savored the rough slide of his palm into Henry’s.

John asked Henry what he was studying as they looked over the menu. Henry’s eye had caught on crispy roast duck.

“Oh, history,” Henry said. “I’m set for British history with a concentration in medieval studies. I’m looking especially at trade routes and immigration patterns.”

John was staring at him again. Henry raised his eyebrows in question, and John shook himself, cut his gaze away and tucked his nose into a glass of water.

“Sorry, I made an assumption and now I’ve been caught out.” John waved a hand, looking about as flustered as Henry felt. A boundless _fondness_ bloomed in his chest.

“What assumption was that?”

John’s mouth twisted into a rueful smile.

“I thought your hanging about the art gallery meant you studied art,” he said. “More fool I.”

“So you were looking for an artist’s opinion on your book, not some lowly history PhD candidate’s?”

John looked stricken until Henry sent him a wink over their glasses of water, and then he huffed out a laugh.

“You must think I’m perfectly ridiculous,” John said.

“I promise you I don’t,” Henry said.

The waiter came round and John ordered them a bottle of wine. After the wine came, was sampled and then poured, after they ordered—duck for Henry, lamb stew for John—John asked Henry what brought him to the states. British history, after all, might best be studied in Britain.

“Yes,” Henry said. “The irony isn’t lost on me. But I had come to believe I couldn’t stay in England. You know I was fifteen when they arrested George Michael for cottaging? Pure entrapment, and how many regular guys, not celebrities, did that happen to every day? Outed, arrested, fired. Lives destroyed. My father—” Henry shook his head and swallowed a mouthful of wine. “I was young when I got it into my head to leave. I tried uni in London, but even that wasn’t enough distance or freedom. When I was twenty-one I was able to transfer to a school in New York.” He cocked his head. “I suppose I have you to thank for that.”

“Me?” Those thick brows rose high.

“Peter moves to New York because he’s got this dream of it, right?” Henry said, gesturing with his wine glass. “Drag queens and free love and no one to answer to—he thought it was utopia. I guess being so young I missed the part where it was cold and impersonal and cruel, and if you got the wrong types of friends, then it was worse than being alone. I missed the part where he left New York for good reasons, not just because of an abundance of ‘peace’ in the Berkshires.”

“I’m sorry,” John said.

Henry shook his head and smiled.

“I’m not. I had loads of fun in New York. When people say it’s the greatest city in the world—I believe that. I say that. I’m people.”

“But here you are, in—”

“Bumfuckford, Illinois?” Henry said. He’d heard some of his students say it once and he’d never wanted to call it anything else again. John laughed with a wince, as if he felt guilty for finding it funny at all. “After I graduated, I futzed about for a few years trying to save money to go to grad school. I finally decided to apply to schools with at least partial funding, and I was offered a full ride here. Who would turn that down?”

John was nodding.

“Of course. Smart. You’ll try to teach after?”

Henry shrugged.

“I suppose that’s the path, isn’t it? Go after tenure track jobs no matter where they are, publish or perish. Meanwhile, I’ve never been able to get assigned a class that isn’t a discussion group for a big lecture, so I make a piss-poor candidate. Bloody—” He swatted his hand about. “—favoritism in the department. Probably every department.”

“Yes,” John said. “The MFAs have to teach elementary composition—to hear them go on, you’d think someone had assigned them to be the executioner at their own grandmother’s trial.”

Henry snorted.

“But at least they’re teaching their own classes.”

“I suppose they have that.”

The salads came—rocket with goat cheese, strawberries, and candied pecans, tossed in something sweet and tangy.

“What about you?” Henry said. “Have you really been in Barrinford for twenty years?”

_What happened to the John Bridgens who lived in New York?_

“My road was not significantly different from yours, I think,” John said. “I had come to New York when I was fresh out of uni. It was the ’80s, and it ended up being as terrifying as it was exhilarating. It delivered me its attendant joys and heartbreaks. I fell in and out of love. I was wounded, like everyone is. I wrote that book. I was teaching creative writing in prisons, I was freelancing for magazines, I was writing corporate copy whenever one of my white collar friends remembered I existed. I still barely made enough money to survive. I decided to try my hand at teaching in an academic setting. I hopped around a bit in New York State and Pennsylvania and, for one horrific semester I have deeply repressed, Wyoming, before I landed here in a tenure track position. After a few years I put together my portfolio and, you know.” He flourished his hand at Cornucopia as if it encompassed the entire university system.

“You got tenure and that was that.”

John hunched into himself and nodded, a self-deprecating smile spreading across his face.

“And my agent, and the department, has been pressuring me to get my second book out ever since. Actually, my agent’s probably given up on me entirely.”

 _Selected Melancholies_ came out nearly thirty years ago. Henry didn’t know anything about writing or the publishing industry, but he did know some writers only had one book and they were perfectly well-respected. Look at Harper Lee. He didn’t want to say something insensitive or ignorant, but John was looking at him with such an intense _curiosity_ , as if he really cared about the literary thoughts of some history department grunt barely high enough on the totem pole to fetch coffee for the real historians.

“I think,” Henry said, careful, “that books come out in their own time. And it is an author who respects his audience, and his own reputation, who allows a book the fullness of its time without impatience. The book will come when it comes—what matters is that you believe in the work, and stand by it, and can be proud of it, whatever it is and whenever it appears.”

John held his gaze for a long moment. Henry waited to feel the wibbles come over him and send him into a spiral of self-loathing, but instead he felt steady and sure. He sat up straight. The waiter arrived to take their salads away.

They never got around to talking about _Selected Melancholies_.

Dr. Crozier’s door was open when Henry reached his office. He popped his head in to see Dr. Crozier bent over a sheaf of papers, squinting down the glasses that had nearly slipped off the tip of his nose. Henry smothered a smile and rapped his knuckles on the jamb. Dr. Crozier looked up and his face split into a grin.

“Ah, Henry! Come in, come in.”

He sat up straight and knocked his handful of papers on his desk to straighten them and set them aside. Henry shut the door behind him and took a seat on the other side of Dr. Crozier’s desk. He was meant to hear about his summer research travel funding by now, and his trepidation grew as he saw Dr. Crozier arranging himself into his patented “with your shield or on it” posture. Dr. Crozier planted his elbows on the desk and his chin on the knot of his hands, and when Henry met his eyes, his trepidation melted into a sinking sense of inevitability.

“I didn’t get it,” he said. Without this trip to Scotland, the completion of his dissertation would be delayed a year or more.

Dr. Crozier sighed and sat back in his chair.

“I advocated for you as vigorously as I possibly could, Henry,” he said.

“I know you did,” Henry said, reaching across the desk to grip Dr. Crozier’s arm. “Of course you did.”

Dr. Crozier had been the finest professor Henry had ever worked with—passionate about his subject, devoted to his students. A bit irascible, but that was part of his charm.

And then Dr. Jane Franklin succeeded Dr. William Parry as the head of the department.

Dr. Crozier patted Henry’s hand and then swiped at the pale fringe that fell into his eyes

“Henry, I’m going to say something, and I hope you take it in the spirit it’s meant.”

Henry frowned. “Sir?”

Dr. Crozier snorted and shook his head.

“How many times have I told you to call me Francis?”

“Oh, about a million by now, I’d imagine,” Henry said. He pulled his hand back and set it into his lap, where he twisted his fingers together in a nervous knot.

“And how long must I wait until you take me up on it?”

“Sir, please.”

Another sigh, another hand passed over Dr. Crozier’s face.

“I want you to think about approaching a different doctoral chair,” he said. “I could ease the way with a few people already on your committee—Tom Blanky, for example, or Ross the younger. Either would make excellent advisors whose research overlaps with your own. There may still be grant opportunities come spring semester, so you wouldn’t lose the time. If my name isn’t attached, you may have an easier go of it.”

“Sir—” That expressive brow sprung into its most infamous angle, as if goading him into something, and Henry took a breath. “ _Francis_ ,” he said. “I’ve TAed for Drs. Blanky and Ross before, and they’re fine—lovely, even. I wouldn’t have chosen them to be on my committee otherwise. But I’ve been five years with you. I hope you don’t find it sentimental when I say I owe so much of my research and my progress to you, and I want you to be my chief advisor in this, and damn whoever would punish a candidate for which name is signed on his dissertation first.”

Dr. Crozier was smiling, a small, sad sort of thing, and gazing at him across the desktop with a fathomless fondness in his eyes. How many hours had they spent together? Henry had taken three classes with him, had taught under him nearly every semester, had shared countless lunches and dinners and teas with him. He was more than a friend, more than a mentor.

“I appreciate your loyalty, Henry,” he said, “and the fervor with which you express it. But the atmosphere being what it is right now, it’s become clear that I’m weighing you down. I’m weighing all of my students down.”

“Francis—”

Dr. Crozier held up a hand.

“Please, Henry,” he said. “Think of it: some four weeks in Scotland, and maybe the outer Hebrides or Northern Ireland next year. Not only that, but prime classes, your own this time, maybe even in the 200 levels. All you have to do is knock my name off a piece of paper.”

“You wouldn’t even be on my dissertation committee?” Distress raised the pitch of his voice, and Henry’s face flamed when he heard himself.

Dr. Crozier had an expressive face. He could not hide his grief.

“We can still see each other socially,” he said. “If you don’t get your own class, you can always TA for mine. No one would hold that against you.”

“Jesus, Francis.”

Dr. Crozier’s mouth quirked up.

“It’ll be all right, Henry,” he said. “You’ll see.”

A sudden, sure knowledge cracked over Henry’s head like an egg.

“Christ, you’re thinking of leaving,” he said. Dr. Crozier fiddled with his sheaf of papers instead of looking at him. “You have tenure and you want to chuck it?”

“If I cannot be effective in my role because of a petty tyrant, then I’m more hindrance than help to every student that crosses my path. If that means finding another path…”

“Dr. Crozier, with respect—fuck you.”

Dr. Crozier’s head snapped up and so did both brows. Henry stood and adjusted his messenger bag.

“Your other students might be taken in by this,” he said. He cleared his throat and squared his shoulders when his voice shook. “The self-sacrificing routine is a good one, I admit. You make an excellent martyr. But you should know by now I’m not something easily got rid of. There’s no one better to chair my dissertation, and any implication otherwise is a rank lie. I’ll be with you ’til the bitter end, Francis, whether you like it or not.”

Dr. Crozier’s eyes shone too brightly. He gave Henry a sharp nod. Henry thumped him on the shoulder once, too hard, before he took his leave. He had to speak to Dr. Blanky.

On a Friday after all their classes were over, Henry met John at the warty gourd. When John turned toward him with a little smile and warmth in his eyes, it was everything Henry could do not to plunder that smile before all and sundry. They had been spending a great deal of time together, talking books and myths and nautical history as well as interdepartmental gossip, the failures of Barrinford’s civil engineering, the increasingly preposterous names given to animals at the local shelter, underground bourbon brands, and so on. They had kissed, and undressed each other, and made love, and slept spooned up like puppies. Henry felt like a penitent, worshiping at the altar of John’s body, but somehow he was still shy of him. Still questioning his right to touch, especially in public, especially on campus. There could be no accusation of impropriety—they were in different departments with no overlap, and Henry was nearly thirty-three—but he was still cognizant of their relative positions.

“Can I ask you something?” Henry said. John hummed out his assent, and Henry tipped his head back to stare up at the gourd. It was some twenty-five feet tall. “What is it about the gourd?”

“What do you mean?” John asked.

“I mean, I watched you stare at this thing two times a week for a month before we met. It’s mesmerized you.”

John was very close. If Henry leaned too much he would be flush against him. His breath caught in his throat.

“You noticed me for a month?” John said, quiet.

Henry risked a sidelong glance at him.

“A gorgeous man broods over lumpy abstract art in the vicinity of my office hours twice a week? Of course I noticed.”

John reached out and squeezed his shoulder briefly. If his hand lingered down Henry’s back when he dropped it, none could say.

“I was hoping to find inspiration,” he said. “Art begets art, and I needed something to jump start my mind.”

“You’re working on a new book?” Henry said. “Sorry—is it rude to ask that?”

“No,” John said. “Although certainly there are rude _ways_ to ask, but that’s not you. I suppose I am working on a new book. Or I’m meant to be, or something. I can’t say as it’s going well.”

“So the gourd didn’t shake anything loose?”

John was looking at him, but Henry couldn’t read his expression.

“No,” John said eventually. “I was very moved by the bumps at first. All the odd swellings. I thought, surely there’s something there. Surely if I just contemplate it more. So I bought art history books and read about the artist and the movement she was involved in and the context of her work, and I did all the things people do when they want to learn about a thing.”

“But…”

John shrugged and flicked his wrist toward the gourd.

“But nothing,” he said. “I look at it and all my thoughts are crowded out by trivia. Meanwhile my brain feels smooth, as unblemished by the germ of any idea as a fallow field.”

Henry had been feeling very brave lately. Going on dates, trying new food, forcing an audience with Dr. Franklin as Dr. Blanky stood stalwart at his side. He fancied himself a knight in a fairy story, only the damsel he was saving was himself, and maybe a valiant little frog named Crozier. With his bravery lashed to himself like armor, Henry slid his hand into the cup of John’s. When John looked up, surprised, Henry squeezed his hand, and John squeezed back.

“Sometimes,” he said, “I’ll listen to a song, or read a wonderful poem, and it alone will light me up. I’ll feel all afire and suddenly I’ll have to bake a cake or unearth my camera. No amount of context or extraneous knowledge can take the place of the thing itself, succeeding on its own terms. If inspiration is a form of success.”

“I think it is,” John said. “Perhaps the only form of success that matters.”

They took their time on each floor of the art gallery. None of the artists were anyone Henry had ever heard of—it was all modern art, and a significant portion was local. There was even a wing of student art. But hand in hand, he wandered with John, listening to the snippets John had hoarded in that expansive mind of his. When Henry spoke, about colors or composition or atmosphere or movement or verve, John listened intently, as though his ideas and opinions were as legitimate as John’s, or any art critic’s.

They stopped in front of a mosaic of woodcuts that took up the bulk of a wall. With an exquisite animal carving making each cube its own objet d’art, they were all arranged together to create an image that depicted a rice field ravaged by fire. John sank into the bench against the opposite wall, and Henry settled in beside him. He could feel John sinking into his thoughts. Henry stared at the mosaic and let his mind float away.

The quietude swallowed up all the world around them.

A week into winter break, Henry was browsing Facebook idly when he saw an article on the Geminids. They would be at their peak late Thursday night—2am on Friday, if he were to be proper about it.

They could drive out to Lake Hasper, an hour away and as far from all the light pollution as they could get. They could lay out some blankets and sip hot tea from thermoses as they watched the meteors cascade through the darkness of the cosmos. They could hold hands and kiss and, perhaps, if it were not too cold and there was no one else about, they could touch souls by joining bodies under the wide open sky.

Christ, but Henry embarrassed even himself.

Still, he plucked his phone from the side table and brought up his texts with John.

**Geminids Thursday night?**

**It’ll be late, but I know the perfect place**

Three dots popped up, and Henry smiled to himself. Texting, he knew, didn’t come naturally to John, but he made an effort with Henry. Warmth suffused him as his phone buzzed.

**The ancient Greeks believed meteors to be portents. What might we expect for ourselves in the coming year?**

Henry grinned down at his phone.

 _Happiness, I hope_ , he wrote, and then deleted. _I don’t need to wish on stars when you’re beside me_ backspace backspace backspace. Nothing he could think to say came out without the unmistakable tinge of near-fatal earnestness. John must know, already, that Henry was in deep—no need to humiliate himself by stating it so baldly.

His phone buzzed again.

**What time are you thinking and where?**

Henry input some info into Google Maps.

**Lake hasper**

**It’s a little over an hour to get there so we’d leave about midnight stay an hour or two**

**Don’t worry i’ll drive ******

The dots kept popping up and then disappearing. Henry found himself mashing his lips behind his teeth in anticipation. He set his phone down and went off to do the dishes. He scrubbed and clanked and clanged his way through an elaborate daydream: him and John, whispering their devotions nude under a blanket of stars in Newfoundland, or Nova Scotia, or Prince Edward Island. He’d let go of the Berkshires, but not the fantasy of running off.

When he returned to his phone an hour later, there were three messages waiting.

******Take pity on an old man, Henry.** ** **

******I suppose I can attempt an afternoon nap in preparation.** ** **

******Alright. I reserve the right to fall asleep on the way home.** ** **

****

John smelled clean and fresh when he stepped into Henry’s car, and Henry could see his hair was still damp. His eyes were tired but fond.

“Are you up for this?” Henry asked. “Honestly?”

John tilted a smile at him.

“I always mean to make time for these things,” he said. “Every year I see something about the Pleiades or the Leonids. ‘I’ll go this time,’ I tell myself. But of course I can never be arsed to go somewhere good for it alone, and I’m asleep with my nose in a book by midnight.” He reached over the console and patted Henry on the thigh before clicking his seatbelt in. “I’ll try not to grumble while you’re giving me memorable life experiences.”

“You’ve been to Lake Hasper though,” Henry said, barely a question.

John shrugged as Henry scrolled through his iPod.

“I went once, soon after I moved here. A colleague decided to have a barbecue there before the semester started. Another colleague drove me. It was fine. Picturesque.”

Henry put on his New Wave mix and the first strains of New Order emerged from the speakers. He input his destination on the GPS, checked his mirrors, and pulled into the empty street. Slantways he glanced at John.

“Which meant you were stuck there, with a crowd of people you didn’t know, all of them making only small talk with you because you’re not only the new guy, you’re the Brit with the dreamy accent, meanwhile all real conversations are laden with inside jokes and the weight of everyone’s history with each other, so suddenly you’re a wallflower watered on people asking where you’re from and you can’t leave on your own recognizance.”

John’s laugh was a low huff.

“I see you’re familiar with my entire life,” he said.

“I hope it’s better, twenty years on.”

“Of course it is,” John said. “Many of my colleagues are my friends. My family, really. And these days they know better than to invite me to barbecues with an overabundance of strangers.”

Henry grinned at him. He turned the music up—“To keep us awake!”—and John began by tapping his fingers, and moved on to humming, until finally, the first Chameleons album, Strange Times, came on, and he and Henry sang along with each song at the top of their lungs.

“Christ, I haven’t heard this song in, what twenty-five years?” he said as the intro to Swamp Thing beat on for more than a minute. “How is it so fucking _good_ and I forgot?”

“I can’t remember where I heard it or who said it,” Henry said, and laughed, “so this is going to make me sound like an idiot, but I read somewhere that music is the most immediate art form. That nothing elicits an instant emotional reaction like music, and in that it is the purest form of art.”

The roads had become lightless and rural, narrow and winding. Henry could feel John’s eyes on him. They sang along to Swamp Thing, and when it was over, John turned the radio down and asked him why he wasn’t some manner of artist. A writer. A musician. A painter.

“You’ve the soul of one,” John said.

Henry hummed as if he’d never considered it before, but of course he had.

“The truth is,” he said, “I’m so moved by all of it. Novels and poetry and oil paintings. Cellists and trumpeters and electric guitarists. Woodworkers, glass blowers, potters, ice sculptors, hedge artists. Dancers and cinematographers and bloody—” He flourished his hand. “—cake decorators. Fashion designers. Calligraphers. I look at it and love it all so well, I don’t know.” He shook his head. “I never felt like I could choose one thing, and that’s proper mastery, isn’t it? To dive deep, and make a lifetime practice of it. I wanted so much, I couldn’t have any of it.” He glanced over and cracked a grin. John was unbearably handsome in the swallowing blueblack. “Some of us, I think, are meant only to be admirers. We’ll leave the creation to you lot.”

“I think,” John said, slow and quiet, “we get so caught up in being good at a thing that we forget what joy there is in simply doing it. How nourishing it is to create something with our hands, not because it will be profound or beautiful or appreciated, but because creation is part of being human.”

Henry clasped John’s hand. John held it tight in his lap, stroking his knuckles. Henry wanted to kiss him, wanted to merge with him. Wanted to say what he suddenly knew as if by the flip of a switch in his brain: I love you. He kept his mouth shut, and turned the radio up.

Lake Hasper was deeply ensconced in the forest of a state park. While they were not the only people who’d had this idea, Henry drove until he reached a stretch of shore where there were no other cars, no other people. He turned the car off and popped the boot open, where he had two sleeping bags zipped into one monster sleeping bag, a blanket, and a few travel pillows. He handed John the pillows and lay the blanket down, and then the sleeping bags. John set the pillows down, and held his hand out for Henry to hold. He led them towards the shoreline.

Trees limned the far shore. The moon was waxing, pale and bright. Its reflection in the lake was crisp and close—it seemed less cold this way, less remote. Without manmade light for miles and miles and miles, the darkness and silence seemed deeper, and the stars brighter. Above them the sky seemed like a rich man’s blanket, glistening with jewels. The milky way spilled across Henry’s vision. His breath took shape and mingled with John’s before it rose to join the stars and dissipated.

“Look,” John said, and pointed up. A meteor streaked across the sky before disappearing in a flare.

“Oh.” Henry’s breath left him. Another meteor, smaller, shot off after it. John slotted his fingers in with Henry’s, and Henry held fast.

“God,” John breathed, voice thick. Another meteor came, and another. John met Henry’s gaze, and all Henry could see was the stars reflected in his eyes.

Henry’s heart felt full, as if all the love inside him were suddenly too big for his single body. Being under the sky as the meteors fell—being under the eye of a nature so much vaster than himself—should have made him feel small, and perhaps it did, in a physical sense. But even with John’s hand anchoring him to this plane, he felt as though he were floating, as though he were more expansive than the borders of his physical form. As if the universe were inside him, all that love a lush garden spilling out, ready to plant life where before there was nothing. He felt the world beating in his pulse. He felt John.

When the meteors began to come one after another, and then a rush of them all at once, Henry and John absconded to their makeshift bed. They huddled in together, shivering body to body. They held each other as the sky fell.

By the time spring semester was over, Henry had secured his research grant, though Dr. Franklin had made it clear that the arduous task of signing her name on his paperwork would be the last “favor” she bestowed upon one of Crozier’s acolytes. The entire business, complete with Dr. Blanky filing a complaint against Dr. Franklin, left Henry feeling anxious and empty.

As for Scotland, going there fulfilled something deep inside him that had been telling him to get out of Barrinford. There was something of coming home in it—to be in the UK again without having to step foot in England came as a great relief he hadn’t expected—but he found he missed John. He had asked John to come with him, but John had refused, citing his writing. Henry felt hollow and unmoored without him—he was home and foreign all at once. Perhaps John’s presence would not have changed that, but surely it would have been a balm to soothe him through it. Henry put his head down and got his work done, pining all the while for a man he already had.

Before he left, John had inquired about the state of Henry’s lease, and they decided that he would move into John’s house when Henry returned in August. John had both a study and an office, and was insistent upon combining the two to make room for an office for Henry. He would be defending his dissertation by this time next year, and then—well. He didn’t want to think about parting ways with John, not so soon after they’d met. But what else was there for someone in Henry’s position? He had to follow whatever job might have him.

In an attempt to defeat jetlag, Henry occupied himself in the arrangement and decoration of his new office. He came upon what looked like a fancy shoebox with a quilted covering buried under a pile of things John hadn’t cleared from the closet. When he picked it up, it was far lighter than he’d imagined, and it went flying, the papers inside spilling out and drifting to the floor like the feathers of a shot bird.

“Shit!” Henry knelt to gather the pages. They were old typewriter pages, the paper gone brittle and yellow. He was shuffling them about to set them to rights when a phrase caught his eye.

_Peter was forgetting Ramón._

Henry frowned and shuffled through to find the first page.

_Selected Joys_ by John Bridgens

Henry dropped the pages back into the shoebox as if he’d been caught nicking biscuits. He set the cover back on it and placed it on a shelf in John’s office.

Later that night he entered the bedroom after brushing his teeth, and John was sat in bed reading with his reading glasses on. Henry admired the view: the smart tortoiseshell glasses, the wave of hair tousled in the wrong direction, the hard calves and thick thighs dusted with hair, the broad, muscular solidity of him, pressing into the cotton of his t-shirt. Henry could feel the thump and thud of his heart working overtime.

Henry climbed into bed beside John and grabbed his own book—he was seeing about lesbians in space this time—but instead of popping it open and diving in, he laid it on his belly and turned his head so he could see John, thoughtful in profile, frowning at his book. A glance at the cover revealed it to be _Paul takes the form of a mortal girl_ , by Andrea Lawlor.

“Any good?” Henry asked.

“Hmm?” John didn’t look up, but frowned at the pages and turned them brusquely.

“Is that book any good?”

“Oh.” John looked up. His eyebrows looked concerned, as usual. Henry reached out and smoothed away the lines on his forehead with his thumb. John’s eyes fluttered shut and he sighed, leaning into the touch. “No, I’m afraid I don’t like it at all.”

“That’s too bad,” Henry said. “Why keep reading it then?”

“I should stop. I just keep waiting for it to get good, since it’s so acclaimed. But it’s only frustrating me.”

“Life’s too short to read shit books, love.”

John smiled and turned enough to press a kiss into Henry’s palm. His heart squeezed.

“You’re right,” John said. He dropped the book off the side of the bed. “I know you’re right. I need something good to cleanse my palate. Maybe a trip to the bookshop tomorrow.”

Henry chewed the inside of his lip. He wondered if there was some unspoken etiquette around having seen the abandoned draft of a sequel to one’s lover’s only published novel.

“What about—what about _Selected Joys_?” he asked.

John’s soft gaze sharpened quickly. He sat up properly, and Henry followed suit.

“You saw that?”

“I didn’t mean to,” Henry said. “I was clearing out the study and the box it was in spilled.”

A muscle in John’s jaw clenched, and Henry’s heart flipped nauseatingly. Profuse apologies were on the tip of his tongue when John cringed and said, “Christ, I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? What for?”

“It’s—it’s total shit, isn’t it? You shouldn’t have had to see it.”

“John.” Henry frowned, shaking his head. He groped for John’s hands and gripped them both. “I didn’t read anything. I put it back straight away. But I know you, and, forgive me the fanboy of it all, but I know your work. There’s no way it’s shit. Even if it was a first draft, even if it’s twenty-five years old. There is no possible way.”

“You love _Selected Melancholies_ ,” John said. Henry ducked his head to meet John’s eyes.

“Yes,” Henry said. “And?”

“And the other one holds no candle to it. The other one is just—” He waved a hand around. “—a pale imitator, unable to capture whatever little magic infused the first. And yet I somehow can’t let it go, and I can’t write anything else, and he—he’s _in here_ as if I owe him something more but I already tore myself inside out for _Melancholies_ and he still won’t let me go!”

Henry’s throat felt hot.

“Who, John?”

John pulled his hands from Henry’s grip only to swipe at the hair that fell across his forehead.

“Bloody—Peter!” he said. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He let it out slow and measured and then said, quietly, “Ramón.”

“Oh.”

“It’s stupid,” John said. “Stupid writer dross. We’re all up our own arses you know—never believe anyone who tells you differently.”

“You could tell me, though,” Henry said. “I’m not—I don’t want to be someone you have to hide parts of yourself from. I know I’m not anyone, but you could talk to me. You could tell me your stupid writer dross.”

John tipped himself into Henry’s chest, hands clutching at his hips. Henry smoothed his hands over John’s hair.

John sat up again, looking decidedly more centered.

“Don’t say things like that,” he said. “You’re not nothing, you’re not no one. You’re—Henry, I hope you won’t think me a sentimental old fool, but I was drowning and you brought me back to life.”

Henry quivered. John cupped his face, pressed his forehead to Henry’s.

“I was stuck, Henry. I was stuck for so long, and without even trying, you dug me up and put me in the sun again. How can you say you’re nothing? You’re _everything_.”

Henry kissed him so he wouldn’t start blubbing all over him. John yielded to his questing mouth, let Henry in, breathed Henry’s breath. When they parted, he began to speak.

“The book was a minor hit when it came out, won a couple of awards. I was just a kid, really, and I wasn’t prepared for how people would treat it. It got optioned for a film, but it was never made. Later it was optioned for TV, and it was never made. My agent started telling me she could have a bidding war for a sequel—what happens to Peter after? Does he find love again? Does he reconcile with his sister and his father? And, the big question: is he HIV positive? So I got to work, but it wasn’t the same. I couldn’t make anything come out right. I was so—God, Henry.” John seized his hand. “When I came to New York, I met this man, this beautiful, contrary, wild wreck of a man. Mateo. He was from Columbia. I loved him—I _allowed_ myself to love him. I thought, New York is where all things are possible. A man can love a man. A white man can love a Black man. This is freedom. Even though the virus was everywhere. Even though the police looked for any excuse to bust down the doors to our bars. Even though crack and heroin were taking our friends from us as surely as the virus was. When you’re young, you believe you’re invincible. You believe things like HIV, hepatitis, cancer happen to other people. Not you. Not the ones you love. But of course we learned otherwise, quickly and well in those days. There could be no pretending. In 1987, my lover, Mateo, tested positive. He was gone a month later. A year later, so was more than half of everyone I knew. _Melancholies_ came from the ferocity, the immediacy of my grief and anger. And yes, my dream of something better for us. My dream of _time_. God, we’d had so little time.”

Henry was stroking John’s hair. The angle was bad, but John arranged his arms around him nonetheless.

“It sounds to me,” Henry said, “like you’d grown past the need to write this story. You’d exorcised something very specific with it and couldn’t—shouldn’t—recapture that. Meanwhile, you’re being told you need to churn out a sequel. What is this, Hollywood?”

Henry felt the curve of John’s smile against his neck.

“Yes,” John said. “Even then I knew it was bullsshit—not everything needs a sequel. So often, things are good _because_ they end. But I thought—I thought if I kept at it, it would mean there was part of him with me still. That if I wrote Peter’s story, even without Ramón, I could keep Mateo with me. But I woke up one day, and my hair was whiter than it was brown, and my heart was still broken, but I couldn’t remember what Mateo smelled like. I couldn’t remember how his hair felt under my hand, or the exact shape of his eyes. I was far from where I’d loved him. I’d moved so many times, I’d lost most of my pictures of him. I’d built this whole life without him. My heart broke all over again.” He heaved a great sigh. “So I stopped writing. It’s a miracle my tenure hasn’t been revoked because I certainly don’t publish anything anymore.”

“Tenure’s convenient like that.”

John slanted a rueful smile at him.

“I’m going to let you in on a secret,” he said. “If they want to fire you, they will find a way. Tenure—” He shook his head. “I won’t say it’s not worth anything. It’s an immense relief. The stability. The guarantee. But it’s not the end all be all. It’s not bulletproof. If they want rid of you, they’ll have it.”

Henry thought of Dr. Crozier and Dr. Franklin. The grudge seemed ancient and personal, and in addition to his own difficulties, Henry had seen Crozier passed over for grants, sabbaticals, and research trips. Yes, Henry knew well the nauseating politicking of academic life—never over, even with tenure. He must have made a face, because John cupped his cheeks and pressed kisses to his lips.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it’s—I know you’re a wonderful teacher and whatever happens, wherever you go—”

“And if I don’t want to?” Henry blurted. John pulled back, but Henry held onto his wrist. It was pouring out of him now—a truth he’d been afraid to admit for the better part of his time in Barrinford. “What if I hate the entire system and don’t want to compromise my happiness chasing bloody _tenure_ , which feels like hunting for unicorns at the best of times, and late-stage capitalism is not the best of times. What if I land in some sundown town? What if I have to take three adjunct jobs teaching nine classes a semester and I still can’t make ends meet? What if I don’t want to leave you, John?”

John swiped over the crest of Henry’s cheekbone. The lines at the corners of his eyes deepened even as the concern in his brow eased.

“Then you don’t have to.”

“I’ll have wasted six, seven years of my life getting this fucking ridiculous degree.”

“Did you enjoy getting it?” John asked.

Henry thought of his peers in the history department, most of whom he liked, a handful of whom he loved. He thought of the classes he’d loved, dismissed the ones he didn’t. He thought of the students he’d taught the last five years, all of his bright stars. He thought of the research he’d been able to do, the chapters of his dissertation that might one day be published. He thought of Dr. Crozier.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

“Then it wasn’t a waste,” John said. “You can do something else with it. You could consult for historical TV dramas. You could write for high school textbooks. You could write your own books—nonfiction _or_ fiction. Hell, Henry, you could learn to paint or play the mandolin or whatever you want. There is life beyond academia, and you have all the time in the world to find it.”

“You too,” Henry said. John’s brow quirked up in question. “You’re such an extraordinary writer, John. You shouldn’t be hiding it away over—” Henry shut his mouth before he could say something grossly insensitive. _Over your misplaced guilt about a man thirty years dead._

John, with those fathomless brown eyes, saw it on Henry’s face nonetheless. Henry wished he could turn that face away so John couldn’t see his shame, but he felt pinned, held open and vulnerable. John cast no ire his way.

“Can I tell you what I was going to ask you on our first date, had I not been such a coward?”

“What?” Henry said.

“I was going to ask you what you wanted from a sequel. What would have been satisfying to you. I was going to ask you that and write whatever you told me.”

A funny sound escaped Henry’s throat, halfway between a guffaw and a squeak.

“You didn’t even know me!” he said.

“I didn’t have to,” John said. “You were a reader unencumbered by the self-conscious jealousies and overanalyses I so often encounter in writers. You didn’t know you were speaking to the book’s author when you defended it to me so passionately. You, I thought, were the key that would unlock twentysome years of writers’ block. Which I don’t even believe in!”

“So what stopped you?”

John cast his eyes into a middle distance, as if he could peer into a past lost to him.

“I came to my senses,” he said. “Most abruptly.”

“What does that mean?”

John’s eyes focused back on Henry’s. He smiled, a sad little thing, and cupped Henry’s cheek.

“That night out at the lake, I realized I had spent decades mourning a man who would never have wanted me to let my life pass me by,” he said. He dropped his hand and sighed, turning away. “Mateo was a one-man party. If he had lived—I don’t know. It’s unlikely we were suited to be together forever, which I’d allowed myself to believe for so long. I couldn’t look it in the face, how different we were, or the fact that so few relationships that start that young last. The best thing I could have done to honor his memory was to have fun. To fuck and get high and do whatever brought me joy. To find someone else. Instead I made my life small and told myself it was for him. I cut myself off from people—from sex, from love, from happiness, and told myself it was a tribute when all it really was was cowardice. I found myself sitting on something very like a date with an intelligent, beautiful man, a man I could love, a man I _could_ keep for whatever passes for forever if only I’d allow myself to grab on with both hands, and I thought—my God, I’ve been a fool.”

Henry slipped his hand into John’s and squeezed. John kissed him, his mouth hot and consuming. Henry gripped the elastic of John’s lounge pants.

“I’ve been working on something new,” John said, voice a rumble through Henry’s gut.

“What’s that,” Henry said.

“A new book. New characters. New worlds. Just—cast off any expectations and do something completely different.”

“How will it go?”

“I’m not sure yet,” John said. “But maybe…there’s an historian.”

Henry laughed and pitched himself backward into the bedding. John propped himself up on an elbow over him, tangling their legs together. He was beautiful.

“Okay, and what’s this historian’s deal?”

“He’d not just an historian,” John said. “He’s also a cryptozoologist.”

“What!”

John laughed, a rich sound that electrified Henry’s skin. He slid his a hand down John’s back and wriggled under the hem of his shirt, where his skin was warm and smooth. John gazed at him with the whole of his heart in his eyes.

“He’s determined to find Sasquatch once and for all, or Nessie, or something, it depends on where I’ll set it. But instead he finds a lonely man alone, deep in the woods, surrounded by books.”

“And is this man terribly handsome?”

“Turns out he’s not a man at all,” John said.

“Oh, I hope he’s a werewolf!”

“That would be telling.”

Henry scoffed.

“Can’t have that.”

“Is it stupid?” John asked, and Henry flattened his lips.

“John. Have you ever read Flannery O’Connor?”

“Henry, I teach creative writing at a major American university.”

“Well then you know,” Henry said. “She said something like, ‘writing is what you can get away with.’”

“Ah.”

“Anything you think of, John—anything you dream up. You can pull it off, I know you can.”

“You’re missing the end of that quote, which is that no one can get away with much.”

“John.”

“Sorry.”

“John, I love you.”

John gazed down at him. Henry thought he would feel nervous, saying it, but instead he felt steady as ever, telling the truth. He could feel his breath, could feel the workings of his lungs flush up against his chest. He reached up and traced the architecture of John’s face. It made him want to build churches, write books, make damn sure the world knew what beauty was. It made him want to pick up a paint brush. John closed his eyes.

“Henry,” John said. “I hope you know how deeply I love you. I hope you can feel it, even when I can’t say it.”

“I can. I do.”

John’s kisses were always worshipful, full of reverence. Even when he was sweeping Henry away with the force of his desire, even when he was pressing inside, Henry’s back flush with John’s front, his hair tangled in Henry’s hair as he bowed him backward to plunder his mouth—he had a way of touching Henry like something precious. Henry reveled in being so savored.

Henry Peglar was older than everyone else in his program, thinking about blowing up a career he had spent his life working toward, and wondering if it was too late to be everything he’d never let himself dream.

But by God, he was in love.

**End**


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